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Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Edith Eger and what is her story?
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Chapter 2: What choices did Dr. Eger make to survive Auschwitz?
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey there, just a heads up. I'm gonna be on tour this summer and fall. You can come see me in San Francisco and Portland in June. You can see me in Australia and New Zealand in October.
In August, I'm mixing my months up here, but in August, you can see me in Chicago and Minneapolis and Detroit.
Chapter 3: How did Dr. Eger find meaning in her suffering?
Then I'll be on the East Coast sometime in November and December. Anyways, grab tickets to that, dailystoiclive.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I remember this was six years ago, seven years ago. I don't remember exactly, but I was talking to Dr. Chatterjee and he was telling me about this incredible woman that he'd met.
Dr. Edith Eager. She was a Holocaust survivor, a student of Viktor Frankl's. She'd survived Auschwitz. And what she loved to do, he said, was dance, that she'd sort of danced through life, that she'd endured these terrible things.
And yet she said it sort of came down to a choice, a choice actually very similar to the choice that the Stoics talked about, which is like, how are you going to respond to these things? What are you going to do about them? Who are you going to be in the face of them?
Edith Eger, your audience probably know who she is. Edith, when she was 16 years old, growing up in Eastern Europe, she was going for a date with her boyfriend that night. She was trying to think about what dress is she going to wear and her family get a knock on the door. Her sister, her and her two parents get put on a train to Auschwitz.
Within two hours of getting there, both of her parents are murdered. An hour or two later, she as a 16-year-old girl gets asked to dance for the senior prison guards. There's many things from that conversation that have never left me, Ryan. She said, the final thing my mother said to me, Edith, nobody can ever take from you the contents that you put inside your own mind.
And then she says, when I was dancing in Auschwitz, I wasn't in Auschwitz. In my mind, I was in Budapest Opera House. had a beautiful dress on, the orchestra was playing, the crowd were cheering. Then she tells me, I started to see the prison guards as the prisoners. They weren't free in their mind, I was.
She said to me, Rangan, I have lived in Auschwitz and I can tell you the greatest prison is the prison you create inside your own mind.
I got to meet Dr. Eager, I guess she was in her early 90s when we met and talked. And sadly, she just passed away a few days ago, earlier this week, at the age of 98.
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Chapter 4: What lessons about resilience can we learn from Dr. Eger?
Just an incredible life, an incredible woman who taught me a lot in the handful of conversations that we had. And so in today's episode, I want to share some lessons from her experience. that I hope will stay with you the way that they've stayed with me. In one of the interviews, you'll hear her daughter talking, one of the episodes they recorded together.
I thought it was really interesting to hear her perspective. Dr. Eger was a teenager in Hungary. She was sent to Auschwitz with her family. 1944, her parents were killed in gas chambers. But it was her courage that kept her and her sister alive. She went on to become a psychologist. She specialized in treating post-traumatic stress disorder.
And she wrote this beautiful memoir called The Choice, along with two other books, The Gift and The Ballerina of Auschwitz. I spoke with her twice on the Daily Stoic podcast, and then we did a live webinar together as well. Let me bring you some chunks of that here.
What you talk about in The Choice is really thinking about what you're thinking, that even something as terrible as Auschwitz, you have the ability to determine what you think about it.
Chapter 5: How does Dr. Eger define forgiveness?
You might be powerless in that you're there, but you can decide what it means to you.
It is very important for me to tell you that I found love and God in Auschwitz because I was able to look at the girls, that they were more in prison than I was, that they were brainwashed. They were brainwashed to look at me and calling me cancer to society. And I was told in Auschwitz, I'm never going to get out of here alive.
And I was able to turn hate to pity and feeling sorry for the girls that they would have a conscience and they would have to pay for what they're doing now, putting children into the oven without even gassing them.
But that doesn't come naturally, right? You have to really work to get yourself there or is that how your disposition just is?
I think I wanted to live so badly. I was in love, you see. And he told me I have beautiful eyes. In the cattle car, my mom told me, And I quote that all the time when I go to school. My mom told me, we don't know where we're going. We don't know what's going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away from you what you put here in your own mind.
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Chapter 6: What is the importance of mental freedom according to Dr. Eger?
I had to learn is what my belief master told me, that look at God from inside out. And I learned to change my thinking and never even imagine that I am not going to get out of here. When I get out of here, I'm going to see my boyfriend. When I get out of here, I'll show him my eyes. When I get out of here, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow is where I was always.
Tomorrow was really, truly a wonderful friend to me.
Are you familiar with James Stockdale, the prisoner of war in Vietnam?
Maybe not.
He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and he studied stoicism. And so he was thinking of the work of Epictetus there as he was being tortured. And I'd be curious what your take on this is, because what he was saying, and obviously not having experienced it, I have no idea, but he was saying that there's this tension because he said the optimists,
were the ones that didn't make it out because the optimist always thought, I'm going to be home by Christmas. I'm going to be home by summer. And it never happened. So he said, you can't be an optimist. You have to be a realist. But at the same time, you have to have this unflinching belief that you are going to survive.
And if you do, you will turn this into the best thing that ever happened to you.
You can't heal what you don't feel. So don't medicate. Don't medicate grief. I also worked with a wonderful girl from Yugoslavia. And together, we were keeping each other alive. But she told me that we're going to be liberated by Christmas. And Christmas came, and she died the next day. That kind of rigid thinking, all or nothing, Didn't work at all, but I knew who was going to die.
I had this ability to look at the eyes, to look at the face of people who just gradually gave up. or they even touched the barbed wire and they got electrocuted, or they touched the guard and they were shot. You know, they took my blood, and one time they asked me about getting my arm so they can take my blood, and I asked, why are you taking my blood?
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Chapter 7: How can we apply Dr. Eger's insights to our own lives?
And he said, to aid the German soldiers. I spoke German fluently. And to aid the Germans so we can win the war and take over the world, especially America. So I couldn't yank my arm away. But you know what I said to myself? You are the stupidest. Because I was a ballerina. And so I never allowed them to get to me. And people say, you make me angry. Nobody makes me angry.
people have as much anger or whatever, any feelings. I do not allow people to ever murder my spirit.
My wife says that. She says, I've said, you know, you're frustrating me. And she said, I can't make you frustrated. That's all on you.
I have an anxiety. And no, you don't. You're thinking anxiously. And yet, yes, Epictetus was certainly right. That is not what's happening. It's what you do with it.
Yeah, Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, he writes, today I escaped anxiety. And he says, no, I discarded it because it was inside me. I let it go. And I think that's a beautiful way to say it.
So when I say that revenge gives you very temporary satisfaction, but forgiveness is the freedom, is the gift that I choose to give to myself. And I think that is a big, big difference that I am not a victim. I was not at all, ever at here. to be a victim, I was victimized.
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Chapter 8: What lasting impact did Dr. Eger have on those around her?
It's not who I am, it's not my identity, it's what was done to me. And I think there is a big difference. I refuse to be a victim. It's not who I am, it's not my identity.
So when you come out of Auschwitz and you go back to your life, and then your life is disrupted again by the sort of tyranny of communism, I'm just curious, how do you not carry resentment or anger, not just at the perpetrators, but at the bystanders or the indifferent population that allowed something like this to happen? I guess that's what I'm struggling with.
Yeah, I think, you know, there is no forgiveness without rage. You got to go through the valley of the shadow of death, but don't get stuck in there. Some people are chronically angry. because the anger somehow keeps them from really facing and go through that pain, but not to get stuck in there. not to be a victim.
So you're in a dark tunnel, but you're going towards the light that you have to have an arrow that you follow. It's very, very important not to run from the past or forget it or fight it, but recognize no matter what happened, I made it. I was very suicidal after I was liberated. I was lying in a cast. I could hardly breathe. And I realized the parents are not coming back.
My boyfriend was killed a day before liberation. It's important to be realistic rather than idealistic because when the idealist doesn't get what they're looking for, they can become very sarcastic, very cynical. The Hungarians can be very cynical, very sarcastic. I like philosophical humor, not sarcasm or cynicism.
Yeah, General Mattis says that cynicism is cowardice, which I think is a beautiful way of expressing it. It's a mechanism to hide from life.
Yeah, very well said. So you read a lot of books, the books that you carry.
Yes.
That's beautiful. That's lovely. You really are maybe wondering, well, what is my truth?
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